Bringing Novel Therapy Options: Biovista is Developing Therapies in Multiple Sclerosis, Mitochondrial Diseases, Oncology, Epilepsy and CFS/ME

With a vision to deliver innovative healthcare therapies more efficiently than has been practiced in the past, Biovista is a pioneer of systematic drug repositioning. It delivers custom drug repositioning, drug de-risking and clinical hold solutions for the BioPharma Industry. Biovista also develops powerful platform technologies for Life science and Biotechnology companies. Biovista has an ongoing R&D program to develop new and improve existing products and services.

As the research community is working hard to improve the understanding of biological processes and their complex inter-relationships, of how diseases modify people’s healthy state and how drugs interact with the bodies, the Biovista team believes that a lot of progress can be made with what is already known. If only it can access, analyze and organize this knowledge in the proper context.

But this alone is not enough. To properly exploit any newfound insight, it needs novel collaboration models and organizational frameworks that are flexible and can exploit the new opportunities in a properly managed and efficient way. And Biovista is working towards both these goals.

The Best-in-Class Biovista Solutions

Biovista partners with BioPharma companies, patient advocacy organizations, hospitals and other stakeholders in the healthcare space to create solutions that meet a range of drug development, pipeline management, and drug lifecycle challenges.

From finding new or better cures through drug repositioning to selecting LCM options and addressing clinical hold orders, Biovista’s B2B Services offer a reliable tool to support management decisions on single assets or the pipeline as a whole.

The B2B Services combine predictive, mechanism-of-action modeling with in vitro/vivo verification capabilities for robust benefit/risk profiling in a translational medicine context. The company is able to deliver significant value at a reduced cost and in dramatically shorter time frames than is normally the case. Biovista’s services have been successfully applied in:

• Drug Repositioning and Loss of Exclusivity (LoE):identifying potential novel applications of existing drugs, this service helps to further exploit existing IP assets, inform the due diligence evaluation of an in-licensed compound, fill the company pipeline, complete gaps in IP estates and protect against competitor actions.
• Benefit/Risk Assessment: predicting potential unknown or unexpected Adverse Events (AEs) Biovista can help with go/no-go decisions on new compounds, clinical trial design or with re-labeling requirements for existing drugs.
• Withdrawals and Clinical Hold situations: providing plausible explanations for observed and an unexpected AE in Phase II or III trial, Biovista can help inform a Risk Mitigation Plan or suggest alternative development avenues, and under certain circumstances provide analysis on confounding indications that may help free a compound from its clinical hold status.

CEO, Andreas Persidis’ Take on the Biovista Approach 

“We focus on empowering multi-disciplinary teams of subject matter experts with powerful platform technologies to develop the pipeline and deliver custom solutions for a drug, disease or molecular target of immediate business relevance to its partners.

At Biovista, we apply our systematic discovery platform to develop a pipeline of repositioned drug candidates in neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, oncology and orphan diseases. Scientists at Biovista use the technology platform to analyze massive data resources and identify non-obvious, mechanism-of-action based associations between compounds, molecular targets, and diseases.

Our business model combines the in-house core strengths with outsourcing and strategic partnering to create synergies that are transforming drug discovery and development.”

The Technology

Biovista’s B2B Services are all backed by a systematic discovery technology platform that is both extremely powerful and flexible.

The company’s proprietary platform, called COSS (Clinical Outcomes Search Space), supports Biovista scientists in uncovering non-obvious correlations between drugs, molecular targets, pathways, adverse events and diseases and constructing evidence-based biological plausibility rationale on a systematic and highly predictable basis.

Biovista’s COSS platform is a hybrid approach, combining literature-based discovery within silico simulations and resource mining to develop ranked lists of outcomes that answer a host of drug development questions. COSS adopts a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ stance, where every reference represents a vote of confidence of some, presumably a reasonably savvy member of the crowd on the topic of interest and where the co-mentioning of two biologically relevant terms (such as a gene and a pathway, or a drug and a target) is taken as an indication of “a potentially interesting, to-be-confirmed correlation in some biological context”.

The COSS hybrid approach has the best chances of success as it integrates the outcomes of other non-deterministic tools and methodologies, thereby providing Mechanism-of-Action based overviews that can point experts ‘versed in the art of drug development’ in highly promising regions of what is a vast problem search space.

The Strong Belief

The challenge for the biological industry is always significant, especially if one considers that the knowledge of biological systems and processes is incomplete, the knowledge of how exactly a disease modulates the healthy state is incomplete and the knowledge of how exactly a drug works in human’s bodies is also incomplete and in flux. Biovista believes that even if existing knowledge is incomplete, it contains hidden gems that if unearthed, organized, interpreted and shared in the right context can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Meet the Leader

Andreas Persidis, Co-founder and CEO: Dr. Persidis has conducted research in the fields of machine learning and applied Artificial Intelligence and has led the launch of multiple international research projects.

He has managed on behalf of the European Commission a roadmap study on systematic innovation has served as an expert reviewer and evaluator for the European Commission and has advised the Greek and Austrian governments in the areas of IT and the life sciences. Since 2010 Dr. Persidis is the President of the Hellenic BioCluster. Currently, he is a member of the EU HORIZON2020 expert advisory group on Innovation for SMEs and a member of the expert advisory group to the Greek Secretariat for Research and Technology.

“We at Biovista profile compounds, whether in late development, in the market or at the generic phase and match them with diseases to find new uses for drugs or new therapies.”